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Royal New Zealand Ballet in 2017

Royal New Zealand Ballet’s search for a choreographer to make a new Romeo and Juliet for the company in 2017 was a short one. After the sell-out success of artistic director Francesco Ventriglia’s The Wizard of Oz in May this year, the ballet company’s board asked Ventriglia to take the job himself. In a big coup for the company Romeo and Juliet will be designed by James Acheson, a triple Academy Award winner for costume design who happens to live in Wellington. Acheson was responsible for the lavish costumes in The Last Emperor, Dangerous Liaisons and Restoration and is setting Romeo and Juliet conventionally, and no doubt sumptuously, in Verona in the late Renaissance. It is Acheson’s first ballet assignment and Ventriglia says the initial discussions with him have been “extremely interesting, challenging and inspirational”.

Ventriglia promises a big, “really classical” production and will use the Prokofiev score. He knows the MacMillan version intimately from his dancing days – “I was Paris, I was Tybalt; it’s part of my DNA, if you want” – but says the MacMillan and the equally admired Cranko versions were perfect “for their moment”. In other words, those productions, which premiered in 1965 and 1962 respectively, are now more than 50 years old. There’s room for other interpretations.

So Ventriglia is doing what he calls a lot of diving into the text and music to find his own way into the story, and is working with a dramaturg to make sure there is “a reason for everything”. A key issue for him, for instance, is the relationship between Lady Capulet and Tybalt, whose connection he wants to strengthen. Romeo and Juliet opens in Wellington in August 2017.

Two mixed bills in 2017 will buck the usual mix’n’match trend by focusing on a single choreographer. RNZB’s opening season, which runs from February to April, features two works by Roland Petit, a choreographer who featured strongly in Ventriglia’s dance career at La Scala (“I grew up with him”) and whose work is rarely seen in this part of the world. New Zealand audiences will see L’Arlesienne (1974) and Carmen (1949), both to the music of Bizet. (The Australian Ballet performed Carmen in 1973.)

Petit died in 2011 after a long and celebrated career. The second featured choreographer, Swedish-born Alexander Ekman, is just 32 and has been choreographing only since 2006. In the middle of the year RNZB will revive Ekman’s wildly popular Cacti (2010) – which it performed earlier this year as part of a triple bill titled Speed of Light – alongside company premieres of Tuplet (2012) and Episode 31 (2011). Ekman’s website describes Tuplet as “a swift, pulsating, eighteen-minute tour-de-force for six dancers which asks the question, what is rhythm?”. Episode 31 was made for Juilliard students in New York and is for a large group of dancers.

Ventrigila plans to organise offstage events to complement both programs. “They will open a new communication with the public,” he says.

RNZB will also help celebrate New Zealand School of Dance’s 50th anniversary at a gala in November. NZSD is the Official School of the Royal New Zealand Ballet and senior students undertake corps de ballet roles in some productions, as they will in next year’s Romeo and Juliet. RNZB’s repertoire is yet to be announced but will include a work to be staged during the 2018 season but unveiled early for the anniversary celebrations.

Next year is a Tutus on Tour year and in 2017 RNZB will take a gala program to regional centres – “a good, proper repertoire gala; even in the small cities they will see the real Royal New Zealand Ballet”. While the program hasn’t yet been finalised, Ventriglia is thinking along the lines of the Le Corsaire pas de deux and Balanchine’s Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux.

There is no international touring locked in at the moment but it’s something Ventriglia always has his eye on. He’d like to take the company back to Italy soon and a return to China is on the cards. “I want to build a bridge between New Zealand and the rest of the world,” he says.

Ventriglia will have a slightly larger company with which to do that. Next year he is able to increase his dancer number to 36 from the current 34.